Measuring customer feedback gives you insight into every aspect of your customer experience. In this guide, you’ll learn the seven easy steps to build mobile-friendly customer surveys and then translate those insights into action with Salesforce.
Creating Your Survey
GetFeedback makes it easy for anyone to build beautiful and engaging surveys. You can create surveys to collect feedback at any stage of the customer journey, from Marketing and Sales to Service and Support.
And because more than 60% of surveys are now opened on mobile phones and tablets, GetFeedback automatically adapts your survey to provide a good experience on any device.
By sending surveys your customers will enjoy, you’ll get more feedback… and your customers will be more likely to take your surveys in the future.
Survey Branding
GetFeedback’s survey builder enables you to customize the look and feel of your survey to match your brand. You can select one of GetFeedback’s built-in themes or create your own. Upload your own background image, select a font, and adjust the colors to provide a seamless experience for your customer.
In addition to customizing the look and feel of your survey in the theme editor, you can white-label their survey environment to create a completely branded experience. You can even tailor the survey link using your own web sub-domain (e.g. surveys.yourcompany.com/NPS-survey).
Survey Content
If you’ve ever used a presentation tool like Powerpoint or Keynote, the GetFeedback interface will feel familiar. With the survey builder, editing is as simple as clicking and typing; your changes will save automatically.
When you’re ready to start adding questions to your survey, GetFeedback offers a wide variety of question types:
Multiple choice
Rating
Short Answer
Picture Choice
Ranking
Form
Slider
Multiple Choice Grid
Rating Grid
Net Promoter Score
Image Upload
You can also add special screens, including turnkey Salesforce lead or contact forms and content-only screens to provide information between survey questions.
Survey Logic
Survey logic makes your survey smarter by changing the survey content based on rules you determine. GetFeedback allows you to choose which questions a respondent sees based on their previous answers — or based on customer data. For example, you could create follow-up questions on a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey that only appear after a respondent gives a low score.
Exit Pages
GetFeedback also lets you design the page your customer will see after completing their survey. You can share a photo, embed a video, or even redirect them to another webpage (e.g. a special offer on your website). By creating multiple exit pages, you can send customers to the appropriate destination based on their survey responses or interests.
Personalization
With survey personalization, you can change the content of your survey to reflect the person taking it. For example, you might greet them by their first name, ask about the specific product they purchased, or mention the support representative they spoke with.
Personalization works by inserting variables called merge fields into your survey. GetFeedback will replace these merge fields with personalized content from Salesforce or your email service provider.
Delivering Your Survey
Each GetFeedback survey has a unique web link, and can be easily distributed through many channels. Emailing surveys is a popular method, and GetFeedback gives you several options:
Set up transactional emails from Salesforce
Use your preferred email marketing solution
Email surveys directly from GetFeedback
You can also distribute surveys through social media, in a Salesforce Community, embedded in a mobile app, or simply linking to them on your website.
Send Surveys with Email
You can email surveys from Salesforce, or using an email marketing solution.
To send a survey via email from Salesforce, create a new email template within Salesforce. Add your email content, then simply paste in the survey link.
To send a survey from an email solution, simply paste the survey link as you would with any other web link. You can hide the link behind a text link or a button to improve the appearance of your email.
Since a plain survey link is anonymous by default, you’ll want to add merge fields to the survey link. Merge fields connect survey responses contact, case, opportunity, and account records in Salesforce. This allows you to map survey answers from GetFeedback to anywhere you need it in Salesforce.
Merge fields also make it possible to personalize the survey. For example, telling GetFeedback your customer’s first name lets you automatically insert it on the welcome screen.
Trigger Surveys from Salesforce
Since Salesforce tracks many of your customer interactions, you can trigger surveys automatically based on customer activity. This is a great way to understand the experience at key touchpoints with your customer.
A common approach is to automatically trigger a survey after a case is closed with your support team. To do this, simply create a workflow that sends your survey email anytime a Case Status is changed to “Closed”.
It’s a good idea to add rules that control which customers receive surveys, and how often. For example, you might limit the number of surveys a customer can receive to one per month.
Send Surveys to a Salesforce Report or List
If you’re looking for a quick way to survey a group of customers, GetFeedback offers a built-in email tool. You can upload a list of customer email addresses or send surveys to a Salesforce report.
Emails sent from GetFeedback are mobile-friendly and styled to match your survey. You can even choose to embed the first question of your survey inside the email to boost survey response rates.
Add Surveys to Websites, Chat, Apps, Communities
Emails aren’t the only way to reach your customers. You can add surveys to websites, live chats, send them via text message, or even embed them in mobile applications.
Surveys are also a great way to engage your customer, partner, or employee community site. For organizations using a Salesforce Community, GetFeedback Flow Actions lets you embed any GetFeedback survey in a Community page.
Preparing Your Salesforce Environment
Now that you’ve built a survey and planned the delivery, the next step is preparing your Salesforce environment to receive the customer feedback.
Saving survey responses in Salesforce gives your team a complete picture of customer satisfaction. You can then use that data to resolve individual issues and measure performance across different regions, locations, and teams.
As you prepare your Salesforce environment, consider how you’ll want to use the feedback you collect. Once you identify your objectives, you can ensure that your data is available everywhere you need it.
Create a Custom Object
GetFeedback is a connected app that doesn’t need to be installed in your Salesforce environment like traditional managed packages. This gives you complete control over the data Salesforce shares with GetFeedback—and where survey results are saved in Salesforce.
For the sake of flexibility, most companies map responses to a new custom object (e.g. “GetFeedback Survey Response”) with fields for each survey question.
This approach helps companies save a complete history of each customer’s feedback. By telling GetFeedback to create a new record for the custom object, each survey response contributes to a rich history of customer sentiment.
Create Custom Fields
If they don’t exist already, you can also add custom fields to track key metrics, like Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS), on your Contact and Account Records.
Unlike the custom object, which will save a history of survey responses, custom fields allow your team to see the latest answer provided by the customer.
Custom fields are also useful for reporting. For example, adding an NPS field to the Account object will let you run a report of at risk accounts.
Mapping Your Survey to Salesforce
Once you’ve created your custom objects and fields, you’re ready to map your survey to Salesforce. Mapping tells GetFeedback where to save a customer’s answers each time a survey is submitted.
Thanks to GetFeedback’s mapping tool, this process requires no coding expertise. GetFeedback will inspect your Salesforce environment, and show you all the objects and fields available for mapping.
You can create as many mappings as you need to populate the fields in Salesforce. It’s fine to map the same question to multiple locations. For example, you might map a Net Promoter Score to custom fields on both the Case and Customer records.
Launching Your Survey
Once all the testing is complete, you’re ready to launch your survey. Survey delivery itself is simple—just send an email or enable your workflow. To ensure everything goes off without a hitch, here are some additional steps to include in your launch planning.
Test Your Survey
Before you launch your survey, it’s important to test each step of your feedback process. Here’s a pre-flight checklist to ensure your survey is customer-ready.
Test your survey content. Ask colleagues and friends to identify confusing questions, spelling errors, and any other issues that could impact your response rate or data quality.
Test your survey length. Ask others to take the survey and report how long it felt. If they got fatigued, considering shortening the survey.
Test your survey appearance on different device layouts (mobile, tablet, desktop). GetFeedback’s built-in preview lets you quickly see how the survey will look on each device.
Test your survey logic. If your survey uses logic, take the survey following each branch to make sure it behaves as you intended.
Test your survey personalization. Test out any personalization by adding merge field values to your survey URL (e.g. First_Name=Karen).
Test your survey delivery. Send yourself a preview of your survey email to test the survey link and merge fields are functioning properly.
Test your survey mappings. Make sure all necessary fields flow from your email into GetFeedback and back into Salesforce.
Test your workflows and alerts. Verify that your notification emails and any support workflows are behaving properly.
Send a Pilot Survey
Asking customers for feedback can feel like a big step, especially the first time you do it. Discussing the process with team members early and often will help you get buy-in and prepare everyone for a successful launch.
Another way you can prevent “survey anxiety” is pilot testing with a small subset of customers. In addition to helping you spot any gaps in your feedback process, a pilot round reduces the workload on customer-facing team members—and ensures any unhappy customers get prompt attention.
Analyzing Results
Once your survey is in the wild, there are several ways to monitor the results using Salesforce or with GetFeedback’s built-in reports and analytics.
View and Export Survey Responses
For a complete view of individual survey responses, start with the Detail Report in GetFeedback. This displays all survey results in a table format. You’ll also see columns for any merge fields that have been passed into GetFeedback.
To analyze your survey results further, you can export your full results for use in Excel, Google Sheets, or a statistics application. Developers and other technical users can also use the GetFeedback API to securely access GetFeedback data from other applications.
Summarize Survey Results
To quickly understand your results, check out the GetFeedback Summary Report. Here you’ll see the results for each question overlaid on your survey content. You can share the results with a colleague by sending them the summary report’s unique link.
The Summary Report also features powerful filtering capabilities, which you can use to drill down into your feedback without relying on a separate application.
Build Salesforce Reports and Dashboards
Survey responses immediately map to Salesforce, where you can augment existing reports and create new ones.
By combining existing customer data with survey results, you can create powerful reports such as:
Detractors sorted by total account value
Average customer satisfaction (CSAT) score by region or agent
Accounts renewing next month with a negative CSAT score in last 90 days
Customers with negative CSAT scores in last 7 days
Promoters in Boston, MA, who could attend an upcoming event
The reports you choose will depend on your survey and the goals of your feedback program. Start with the ones that will help your team accomplish immediate business objectives, like identifying at-risk accounts to reduce churn, so you can demonstrate quick wins.
Next, use your reports to build dashboards that give your teams visibility into the metrics you care about. And since each survey response is linked to specific records, you can even create personalized performance dashboards for different teams and regions.
Use GetFeedback’s Real-Time Analytics
GetFeedback also includes its own powerful analytics capabilities, including real-time customer feedback dashboards. GetFeedback dashboards update in real time, so you can keep an eye on key metrics and see a live stream of customer feedback.
GetFeedback Analytics allow anyone on your team to build a dashboard in minutes, without the need for Salesforce administrator access or reporting knowledge. This is especially valuable to organizations that are still implementing Salesforce or where Salesforce administrators are unavailable due to other business needs.
Taking Action
The final step—and the most important one for your business—is taking your customer insights and turning them into action. By using GetFeedback and Salesforce together, you can use feedback to respond to individual customer needs, and to chart your team’s progress over time.
For service and support teams, taking action means “closing the loop”. By harnessing the power of customer feedback in Salesforce, you can make it easier than ever to resolve issues.
Set Up Email Alerts
When a survey is received, you can send email alerts to your team based on the feedback received. A common example is alerting an account manager when a customer has a poor experience. You can set up email alerts using either a Salesforce workflow or GetFeedback’s built-in custom notifications.
Respond to Customer Issues
An important best practice for customer feedback surveys is to build service workflows that ensure your team “closes the loop” with a customer. By proactively addressing issues as soon as they arise, you can take steps to repair the relationship or even turn a negative experience into a positive interaction that builds trust.
For example, when a customer responds with a low satisfaction score, you can automatically create a case and assign it to a Customer Success Manager so they can follow up.
Monitor Performance Over Time
Every organization is unique, and so are its goals. That’s why the most important benchmark for success is improvement over time. Using customer feedback as a key performance indicator (KPI), organizations can track current performance against past performance to ensure they’re moving the needle on customer happiness.
When you share customer experience insights with your team and track the progress of your customer feedback over time, you can turn insights into action—and celebrate the results.